Un artículo sobre la fiabilidad de las huellas digitales. Una de las afirmaciones más chocantes es que la identificación por las huellas digitales nunca ha sido demostrada científicamente:
No one disputes that fingerprinting is a valuable and generally reliable police tool, but despite more than a century of use, fingerprinting has never been scientifically validated. This is significant because of the criteria governing the admission of scientific evidence in the US courts.
The so-called Daubert ruling introduced by the Supreme Court in 1993 set out five criteria for admitting expert testimony. One is that forensic techniques must have a known error rate, something that has never been established for fingerprinting.
Empieza hablando de algunos errores de identificación. Luego comenta la carrera por establecer la tasa de error en las identificaciones por huellas digitales.